From tackling the aesthetic wizardry of such early efforts as RoboCop 3 and Armageddon, to more recent work such as the Star Trek: Picard series and even Star Wars: The Force Awakens, artist Robert Chapin has a genre CV worth celebrating, as Andrew Cardno discovers with this exclusive interview...

The Millennium Falcon from Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

Robert “Bob” Chapin (also known as Dr. Rob, in select circles) is the Hollywood Everyman. Working in the industry for over 30 years, Bob has done it all. He has done VFX for some of the biggest names in the business, a stuntman of great renown particularly in the realm of swordplay, a writer and director of projects such as his hit web-series The Hunted, which has been running for 24 years, and Ring of Steel. If you can think of something, Bob’s already done it – weathering the storm on Fred Dekker’s notoriously troubled RoboCop 3 (1993), an early visual effects project, and stepping into such FX-heavy superhero blockbusters as X-Men 2 (2003), The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) and The Fantastic Four (2005). Now at the age of 60, Bob shows no signs of slowing down and continues to occupy his time with whatever he feels like doing, as Infinity was happy to find out…

Let’s begin with a pretty obvious question – how did you start your career in Hollywood?

I came to LA in 89, my brother was out here acting and writing. Meanwhile, I had no idea what I wanted to do. But when I saw the Disney movie Tron in the early 80s, I thought “Man, this is so cool” and I knew that was exactly what I wanted to do…

Right, Tron was pretty ground-breaking when it comes to visual effects…

Exactly! And it was because of that film that I signed up for some of the first ever computer classes at my high school. This was back in the day when we had TSR-80’s, the first ever computers that people were taught how to efficiently use! I thought that if I wanted to do something like Tron, then, hey, I’m going to have to go to school for it. However, there were no colleges offering classes for the visual effects side of things. Nowadays you can go to any college and come out qualified with a computer graphics degree. But, instead, I went to college and did a computer science degree. Then, eventually, I ended up at a party with two peopleJamie Dixon and Rebecca Marie. These two had a visual effects company called PDIstanding for Pacific Data Imagingand I was like “Oh cool, that’s exactly what I want do, actually,” and during our first conversation I had mentioned that I also did sword-fighting and coincidentally that’s exactly what they wanted to do [laughs]. So, it ended up being this perfect situation where I would teach them sword-fighting if they would let me work for them [laughs]. I was doing all this, while still etching out some money with stunt work, which I did to make ends meet. Really, I just happened to be at the right place at the right time, which is how things work in LA…

Bruce Locke in Robocop 3 (1993)

Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams in Hook (1991)

You are very heavily involved in both camps of cinematic creation from practical to digital, do you feel like your stunt work has had any impact on your visual effects work or vice versa?

Back in the day I was one of the few stunt guys that also did visual effects. I’ve worked on a few films where I’ve been the star, the stunt coordinator and effects guy all in one, such as Dragon Fury and Lancelot: Guardian of Time. When I was working on Dragon Fury, I was doing sword-fights on the show and the prop guy told me he had always wanted to learn how to sword-fight.